The Princess Diana Pay-Per-View Seance

A Voice From the Grave, By Appointment

In a London studio, Jane Hamilton-Parker closed her eyes and began speaking as if the words were not hers. "I feel very much that she is saying to me that she did love Dodi," she said, before shifting into what the program presented as Diana's own voice: "Do you understand that a lot of people were saying untruths that I would not have married him? I want you to know that all I wanted was a man to walk beside me and that loved me."²

Americans who paid $14.95 to watch this on March 9, 2003, saw it exactly as it happened. British viewers, watching a version of the same program on LivingTV the following night, never saw this moment at all.^3,2

Diana had been dead less than six years. She and Dodi Fayed died in the early hours of August 31, 1997, when their Mercedes crashed in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris; the crash also killed driver Henri Paul, while bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones survived.² By 2003 she remained, by any measure, one of the most commercially bankable figures in British life, and a production company called Starcast, run by executive producer Paul Sharratt, built a global television event around the idea of letting her speak again.^3,2

Sharratt framed himself, oddly, as the voice of reason inside his own project. "For me, I started as a total skeptic," he told Good Morning America days before the broadcast. "I still am a skeptic. I must say that things happened both in Paris and in London, things were said that has given me a lot of food for thought."² The show he was selling, hosted by former Avengers star Patrick Macnee and featuring Diana's former assistant Louise Reid-Carr, combined documentary interviews with Diana's biographer Andrew Morton and Dodi's father Mohamed al-Fayed with a reenacted drive through the Paris tunnel where Diana died, two live seances, and one separate channeling session led by a different psychic, Patricia Bankins.^1,3,2

What the British audience got instead of the seance was a panel of scholars discussing it. LivingTV's reasoning had nothing to do with taste alone. "Legally, no broadcaster in the U.K. could transmit seances of this nature," spokesman Richard Woolfe told the New York Post, and the network's cuts followed standards enforced by Britain's Independent Television Commission.^3,4 Sharratt was furious about the last-minute change: "We were originally told that cable outlets [in England] could broadcast seances that were off-limits to regular over-the-air broadcasters like the BBC," he said. "The sudden banning of a key element of the show is a bit distressing."³ The result was two broadcasts of the same program, legally incompatible with each other, airing a day apart.

The condemnation that followed came fastest from the place most tied to Diana's memory. David Fawkes, spokesman for Althorp, her ancestral home and burial site in Northamptonshire, called the whole project "contemptible."³ The objection was not really about whether the Hamilton-Parkers believed what they were doing. It was about a recently dead woman's grief being sold by the minute, with one country's broadcaster deciding that the core of the show was too far over the line to air at all, and another country's pay-per-view service deciding $14.95 was a fair price for exactly that material.^3,2,4

Reported messages elsewhere in the special stayed almost deliberately vague: that Diana was "having fun" in the afterlife and spending time with Mother Teresa, that she was still watching over William and Harry.^4,5 None of it could be checked against anything. What could be checked was simpler: the same channeled line about wanting a man who loved her played, uncut, to one paying audience, and never aired at all to the other.^3,2

Timeline

1. 1997-08-31Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed die in a car crash in the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris².
2. 2003-02-26ABC News reports on the upcoming pay-per-view special, quoting producer Paul Sharratt².
3. 2003-03-09The Spirit of Diana airs in the US via In Demand pay-per-view for $14.95^3,2.
4. 2003-03-10LivingTV airs an edited UK version with the seance scenes replaced by a scholarly panel discussion^3,4.

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